Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Brownie, You're Doing a Heckuva Job

Dear Reader!

As the Gulf chokes on crude oil, I too, am choking, as I read the newspapers and watch the TV "news" and see that somehow everyone has decided that the British Petroleum man-made, mishandled fiasco, the "worst oil spill in American history [until the next one]", is the fault of President Obama.

In fact, like the economic crisis and the recession, like the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina to which it is being compared, like so many other problems facing the U.S., the oil disaster has direct and indirect connections to those still-at-large criminals, Bush and Cheney. Big time! Consider:

Things come out little by little and only when forced by disaster. Installation of the remote control shutoff device used by the rest of the world was a requirement jettisoned by Cheney and Bush as superfluous and expensive. This protection would have cost $500,000 – a fraction of the CEO’s annual salary at BP. The drilling itself... met with pockets of natural gas forcing their way back up the drilling pipe. The men on the rig were told to go ahead; the government controllers only said to use caution. And the seal in the pipe was cemented in place by Halliburton – Cheney’s company.

Sounds like another Iraq job, doesn't it? And would anyone be surprised to hear that Bush calls the White House and delivers that famous line from 2005, verbatim: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."